The Cheat Code to Life

THEWATCHERS

A Silicon Valley startup is launching a fleet of imaging satellites that are cheap, small, and ultra-efficient. Their up-to-the-minute snapshots of the planet will give us data that could upend industries, transform economies—even help predict the future.

Photo-illustration: Jeff Lysgaard

LOOKING DOWN FROM 500 MILES above Earth’s surface, you could watch the FedEx Custom Critical Delivery truck move across the country along 3,140 miles of highway in 47 and a half hours of nonstop driving. Starting off in Wilmington, Massachusetts, the truck merges south onto I-95 and keeps right at the fork for I-90. Then it winds its way across the width of New York State, charging past the airport in Toledo, through the flatlands of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, snaking down the mountain passes and switchbacks above Salt Lake City, across the Nevada deserts and over to Sacramento, then down the highway toward San Jose and off at the California 237 exit, headed for Mountain View.

Neither Jim nor Carla Cline, a married couple who take turns at the wheel, has the slightest inkling that the large wooden crate in the back of their truck might radically change how we see our world. When they finally pull into the parking lot of a low warehouse-like structure around the corner from a Taco Bell, more than a hundred engineers, coders, and other geeks who work for a startup called Skybox Imaging are there to cheer the Clines’ arrival. He and Carla delivered some dinosaur bones once, Jim tells me, leaning out the window as he idles by the curb. Elvis’ Harley too. “Never saw anything get the attention this got,” he says.

Dan Berkenstock, executive VP and chief product officer of Skybox, is in the cheering crowd, fidgeting with his half-filled coffee mug. In worn Converse sneakers, short-sleeved blue oxford shirt, jeans, and glasses, he looks younger than most of the employees at the company he founded, which has been his passion ever since he dropped out of Stanford’s engineering school in 2009. Berkenstock’s idea for a startup was far outside the mainstream of venture capital investment in the Valley, with its penchant for “lean” software plays and quick-hit social apps. But his company got funded nevertheless, and now Skybox has designed and built something unprecedented—the kind of once-in-a-lifetime something that makes the hearts of both engineers and venture capitalists beat faster. The Clines have just delivered the final piece: a set of high-end custom optics, which will be inserted into an unassuming metal box the size of a dorm-room minifridge.

“What would you say,” I ask Jim, “if I told you that you had a satellite in the back of your truck, and these guys were going to launch it into space?” He grins.

“I’d say that’s pretty damn cool,” he answers. “If they can get it up there.”

Data From Above

What can you really learn from 500 miles above Earth? Quite a lot, it turns out. Already, our limited commercial services for satellite imaging are providing crucial data to companies, scientists, and governments. —Sara Breselor

PARKING PATTERNS

Chicago-based Remote Sensing Metrics tracks the number of cars in parking lots to forecast retail performance.

DATA MINES

A view of the size of pits and slag heaps around a mine can allow for an estimate of its productivity.

After an oil spill, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracks the size and movement of oil slicks.

Forty years after humans first saw pictures of a blue and white marble taken from space, it’s remarkable how few new images of Earth we get to lay eyes on. Of the 1,000 or more satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, there are perhaps 100 that send back visual data. Only 12 of those send back high-resolution pictures (defined as an image in which each pixel represents a square meter or less of ground), and only nine of the 12 sell into the commercial space-based imaging market, currently estimated at $2.3 billion a year. Worse still, some 80 percent of that market is controlled by the US government, which maintains priority over all other buyers: If certain government agencies decide they want satellite time for themselves, they can simply demand it. Earlier this year, after the government cut its imaging budget, the market’s two biggest companies—DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, which between them operate five of the nine commercial geoimaging satellites—were forced to merge. Due to the paucity of satellites and to the government’s claim on their operations, ordering an image of a specific place on Earth can take days, weeks, even months.

Because so few images make their way down from space every day, and even fewer reach the eyes of the public—remember how dazzled we were when Google Earth first let us explore one high-definition image of the planet?—we can fool ourselves into thinking that the view from space barely changes. But even with the resolutions allowed by the government for commercial purposes, an orbiting satellite can clearly show individual cars and other objects that are just a few feet across. It can spot a FedEx truck crossing America or a white van driving through Beirut or Shanghai. Many of the most economically and environmentally significant actions that individuals and businesses carry out every day, from shipping goods to shopping at big-box retail outlets to cutting down trees to turning out our lights at night, register in one way or another on images taken from space. So, while Big Data companies scour the Internet and transaction records and other online sources to glean insight into consumer behavior and economic production around the world, an almost entirely untapped source of data—information that companies and governments sometimes try to keep secret—is hanging in the air right above us.

Here is the soaring vision that Skybox’s founders have sold the Valley: that kids from Stanford, using inexpensive consumer hardware, can ring Earth with constellations of imaging satellites that are dramatically cheaper to build and maintain than the models currently aloft. By blanketing the exosphere with its cameras, Skybox will quickly shake up the stodgy business (estimated to grow to $4 billion a year by 2018) of commercial space imaging. Even with six small satellites orbiting Earth, Skybox could provide practically real-time images of the same spot twice a day at a fraction of the current cost.

But over the long term, the company’s real payoff won’t be in the images Skybox sells. Instead, it will derive from the massive trove of unsold images that flow through its system every day—images that, when analyzed by computer vision or by low-paid humans, can be transmogrified into extremely useful, desirable, and valuable data. What kinds of data? One sunny afternoon on the company’s roof, I drank beers with the Skybox employees as they kicked around the following hypotheticals:

— The number of cars in the parking lot of every Walmart in America.

— The number of fuel tankers on the roads of the three fastest-growing economic zones in China.

— The size of the slag heaps outside the largest gold mines in southern Africa.

— The rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing brighter.

Such bits of information are hardly trivial. They are digital gold dust, containing clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses. (One company insider confided to me that they have already brainstormed entirely practical ways to estimate major economic indicators for any country, entirely based on satellite data.) The same process will yield even more direct insight into the revenues of a retail chain or a mining company or an electronics company, once you determine which of the trucks leaving their factories are shipping out goods or key components.

Plenty of people would want real-time access to that data—investors, environmentalists, activists, journalists—and no one currently has it, with the exception of certain nodes of the US government. Given that, the notion that Skybox could become a Google-scale business—or, as one guy on the roof that afternoon suggested to me, an insanely profitable hedge fund—is not at all far-fetched. All they need to do is put enough satellites into orbit, then get the image streams back to Earth and analyze them. Which is exactly what Skybox is planning to do.

The most important thing to understand about Skybox is that there is nothing wonderful or magical or even all that interesting about the technology—no shiny new solar-reflecting paint or radiation-proof self-regenerating microchip, not even a cool new way of beaming signals down from orbit. Dozens of very smart people work at Skybox, to be sure, but none of them are doing anything more than making incremental tweaks to existing devices and protocols, nearly all of which are in the public domain or can be purchased for reasonable amounts of money by anyone with a laptop and a credit card. There is nothing impressive about the satellites they are building until you step back to consider the way that they plan to link them, and how the resulting data can be used.

There are 1,000 satellites orbiting the planet at any given time, But only 12 send back hi-res images.

Berkenstock, John Fenwick, and Julian Mann first teamed up as grad students at Stanford to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize, which promised $20 million to the first group of contestants that could land a rover on the moon and send back pictures. The stock market crash of 2008 killed their funding, but the germ of the Stanford team’s idea—to use cheap off-the-shelf technology in space and make money doing it—stuck with them, and they hit on the idea of building imaging satellites along the same principles. “We looked around at our friends and realized that we knew this unique group of people who had experience building capable satellites at a fundamentally different price point,” Berkenstock says. “The potential was not just to disrupt the existing marketplace—we could potentially blow the roof off it and make it much, much larger.”

The idea was to start with a CubeSat, a type of low-cost satellite that aerospace-engineering grad students and DIY space enthusiasts have been playing with for more than a decade. The CubeSat idea began in 1999, when two engineering professors, looking to encourage postgraduate interest in space exploration, came up with a standard design for a low-cost satellite that could be built entirely from cheap components or prepackaged kits. The result was a cube (hence the name) measuring 10 centimeters on each side, just large enough to fit a basic sensor and communications payload, solar panels, and a battery. The standardized size meant that CubeSats could be put into orbit using a common deployment system, thus bringing launch and deployment costs down to a bare minimum that made it feasible for a group of dedicated hobbyists in a university lab or even a high school to afford. All told, a CubeSat could be built and launched for less than $60,000—an unheard-of price for getting anything into orbit.

The first CubeSats launched on June 30, 2003, on a Russian rocket from the Plesetsk site, and entirely transformed the world of amateur space exploration. A group of Stanford students worked with a private earthquake-sensing company to put up something called Quakesat, which aimed to measure ultralow-frequency magnetic signals that have been associated by some researchers with earthquakes. One team sponsored by NASA sought to study the growth of E. coli bacteria. (True to form, the NASA team reportedly spent $6 million on its first CubeSat mission.) Other teams launched CubeSats to study and improve the CubeSat design itself. The concept proved to be so simple and robust that a website called Cubesatshop.com sprang up to help even the laziest team of grad students build a cheap satellite of their very own: Just click on each of the tabs (Communication Systems, Power Systems, Solar Panels, Attitude Control Systems, Antenna Systems, Ground Stations, CubeSat Cameras) to order the necessary parts.

After 10 years of CubeSat experimentation, it was left to Berkenstock, Fenwick, and Mann to realize that the basic principles of DIY satellite construction might be put to extremely profitable use. As the three men saw it, massive advances in processing power and speed meant not only that they could build a Sputnik-type satellite from cheap parts but that they could pack it with computing ability, making it more powerful than Sputnik could ever be. By extending the craft beyond the CubeSat’s 10-centimeter limit to roughly a meter tall, they could expand the payload to include the minimal package of fine optics able to capture commercial-grade images. Sure, it would be significantly heavier: Whereas the smallest CubeSat weighs 2.2 pounds, the Skybox satellite would weigh 220 pounds. But Skybox’s “MiniFridgeSat” could use software-based systems to relay imagery and hi-def video back to Earth, where large amounts of data could be stored and processed and then distributed over the web.

When Mann and Berkenstock first brought up this idea with Fenwick—a spectral guy with a shaved head who vibrates at a Pynchonesque level of intensity—it turned out that he knew a lot more about satellites than they did. One of his jobs before Stanford had been as a liaison in Congress for the National Reconnaissance Office, the ultrasecret spy agency that manages much of America’s most exotic space toys. A graduate of the Air Force Academy and MIT, he took the job at the NRO after a series of laser eye surgeries failed to qualify him as an Air Force pilot. Even if Fenwick couldn’t talk about everything he knew, he could help do the math and hook the team up with other smart people. More important, he understood not just the value the US government might see in Mann and Berkenstock’s idea but also the threat. When I ask him whether his government experience came in handy in helping to design and build Skybox, he pauses and raises a hand to his head. “Every day I bite my tongue so I don’t go to jail,” he says, quite seriously.

Soon, in a Stanford management class, the three founders met the woman who would become their fourth—Ching-Yu Hu, a former J.P. Morgan analyst with experience in crunching big data sets—and together they wrote up a business plan. The four enrolled in Formation of New Ventures, a course taught by Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Software. Leslie was impressed enough to get in touch with Vinod Khosla, of Khosla Ventures, who handed them off to Pierre Lamond, a partner of his at the firm. Lamond had been given a $1 billion fund to invest, roughly a quarter of which was supposed to go to “black swan” science projects—the sorts of ideas that would probably fail spectacularly but might pay off big, and at the very least would be fun to talk about at dinner parties. And sure enough, Lamond, who served as an intelligence officer in the French army before coming to California and ran half a dozen Silicon Valley companies over the past four decades, gave Skybox its first $3 million.

With the money, what had been a space company of young outsiders soon got a serious injection of Big Aerospace expertise. Worried about future fund-raising, Lamond soon felt (to Berkenstock’s huge disappointment) that Skybox needed an experienced CEO. So he brought in Tom Ingersoll, a former McDonnell Douglas executive who had left to start a ground-operations outsourcing firm, Universal Space Network, that sold its services largely to NASA and the Defense Department. Ingersoll, in turn, recruited a host of scientific advisers who had spent their lives in the traditional aerospace industry and government-sponsored big science programs.

Chief among these advisers was Joe Rothenberg, who ran NASA’s human space exploration programs and the Goddard Space Flight Center. Rothenberg’s leadership of the effort to fix the Hubble Space Telescope had made him a legend in the small fraternity of men who ran America’s space programs back in the days when they spent real money. When I first met Rothenberg, it was hard to understand just what he was doing there—despite the fact that he had no stake in the company, Rothenberg was working at Skybox two full weeks a month, looking for bugs in its systems. I soon realized that, to my surprise, he was there not to get rich but to help revolutionize space exploration.

Today’s NASA, Rothenberg freely admits, has failed to build and maintain the qualified workforce it needs, “and a large fraction of them, quite frankly, are aging people who should be retired or in different jobs.” Rothenberg looks at the young software engineers at Skybox and sees that they think in a fundamentally different way about how to solve problems, and he wants NASA to take note. “If you took somebody my age, 50 to 70,” he says, “then took these guys and gave them the same mission, you’d get two totally different spacecraft. And the price difference between them would be 10 to one.” The possibility that Skybox might serve as a model for a different way of doing things in space is a big reason why Rothenberg is there.

The Washington pedigrees of old heads like Rothenberg and Ingersoll might also come in handy. The disruptive threat that Skybox poses to the space-based commercial imaging market might also annoy some powerful people in the US government who could deny the company licenses, seize its technology or bandwidth, and place restrictions on the frequency and users of its service. Skybox has come as far as it has, Fenwick says, because the right people in Washington can see the use of its service. “If the wrong person gets pissed, they’ll shut us down in an instant,” he admits.

On one recent trip to Washington, Ingersoll says, a high-ranking government technologist warned him that “the antibodies are starting to form.” On the same trip, a senior Defense Department official took him aside and counseled, “You better be thinking about the role you want the government to play in your company.” To avoid any military-industrial squelching of its technology before launch, Skybox has loaded up on advisers and board members with high-level defense connections, including Jeff Harris, former president of Lockheed Martin Special Programs, and former Air Force lieutenant general David Deptula, who captained the Air Force’s use of drones and who may see similar utility in a constellation of cheap satellites sending back timely video from above Earth’s trouble spots. In the end, the government will likely commandeer some of Skybox’s imaging capabilities under terms similar to those imposed on other vendors. But Skybox feels confident that its network will be so wide and so nimble that there will be plenty of images—and data—left over for everyone else.

Mission control—someday.
Photo: Spencer Lowell

Building SkySat-1 in the clean room.
Photo: Spencer Lowell

The Skybox clean room, where the company’s first satellite, SkySat-1, is being made, is a Plexiglas-walled rectangle the size of a suburban living room; it’s also a place where any precocious 10-year-old with a few years of model-rocket experience might feel immediately at home. Fred Villagomez, a technician in his midforties, sits at one of three stations at a workbench examining the payload antenna feed through a pair of protective goggles and making small adjustments with an X-Acto knife. To the right of his work area is a bottle of acetone, of the kind that any mildly advanced basement model-builder might use to remove excess globs of glue. At the end of the bench are three surplus movie lights, which he is using to test solar arrays.

To an outsider’s eye, there is something sweet and almost cartoonlike about how Skybox is hand-producing homemade satellites with a hobby knife, all in an effort to launch a multibillion-dollar business. Before coming to Skybox, though, Villagomez worked at Space Systems Loral, which produces high-end space behemoths on classified budgets. Kelly Alwood, the satellite’s project manager, also worked at Loral after graduating from Stanford, and before that at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Her boss, Mike Trela, who oversees both the satellites and the launches, worked at the space program lab at Johns Hopkins.

Ronny Votel, who looks like a blond USC frat boy minus the letter jacket and who codes in a graphic environment called Simulink, wrote much of the early part of the software that will help the satellite track objects on the ground and manage large-angle maneuvers. He met Berkenstock at Stanford and was the second person hired after Skybox received its initial $3 million in funding. “My first month on the job, I was vetting out telescope and optics packages,” he recalls. “I had no training in optics. But we knew the math and how to order a book off of Amazon and how to write code and do sanity checks. I think it was fear that drove us to do a good job.” The ground software alone will have 200,000 lines of original code, of which approximately 180,000 are already written.

That focus on software permeates Skybox’s business. Take the cameras: Compared with most satellites, they are cheap, lo-res, unsophisticated. “One of the image-processing guys once joked that the images from the satellite are equivalent to those from a free cell phone that you would have given away in Rwanda,” says Ollie Guinan, Skybox’s VP of ground software. But by building homegrown algorithms to knit dozens of those images together, Skybox can create “one super-high-quality image where suddenly you can see things that you can’t see in any one of the individual pictures.” That focus on off-board processing means less work has to be done in the satellite itself, allowing it to be lighter and cheaper. “Think about your iPhone,” Ingersoll explains to me during my second visit. “There was a time you had a phone, a Palm, a PC, and also a camera. Now the computing capability has improved to the point where it is fast enough, with a low enough power, at a low enough price, that you can integrate these functions into much smaller packages at a much lower cost.”

Sending Just Enough
Space Into Space

To cover the whole Earth with imaging satellites, Skybox needs to break free from the design patterns that have defined commercial satellite construction to date. This chart shows the relative scale of SkySat-1, set against its high-end (and low-end) alternatives. —Sara Breselor

CUBESAT

Skybox’s founders were inspired by the CubeSat, a tiny DIY satellite design—buildable for less than $60K—that roughly 100 teams have launched.

SKYSAT-1

Essentially, Skybox scaled a CubeSat up to the size of a minifridge, packing it with computing. Total cost: under $50 million for a satellite that will last four years.

WORLDVIEW-2

Launched by DigitalGlobe in 2009, this satellite takes ultra-hi-res photos and will last for nearly eight years. The down­side: It cost an estimated $400 million to build.

Illustrations by Remie Geoffroi

to keep the feds at bay, skybox has loaded up on advisers with big defense connections.

Guinan is a black-haired Irishman who grew up poor and spent nearly a decade working in the Valley on visas with short-term expiry dates before eventually landing a good job at Yahoo. When he fled for Skybox, he took five of his best engineers with him, as well as a healthy respect for the elegant and powerful architectures that can wring information and intelligence from good enough hardware. The more emphasis the design team placed on software, the smaller and cheaper the hardware became—and the less power the satellite required, which helped with the rest of the design, mainly by making it possible to carry a high-enough-quality optics package at a ridiculously low weight.

Skybox also found ways of piggybacking on other people’s technology. The image-reception system is built on top of a satellite TV broadcast protocol, the same one that allows DirecTV signals to get through an electrical storm or heavy rain. “They’ve put hundreds of millions of dollars into building these systems and making them as perfect as they can be,” Guinan points out. “We took advantage of that.” This means that Skybox will be able to use a 6-and-a-half-foot antenna to reach a dish the size of a dinner plate on the SkySat instead of the much more expensive, 30-foot antenna that commercial satellite-image companies typically require.

Between now and then, the real question is whether Skybox’s VCs will be able to fund the company long enough to get SkySat-1 into space. Eight months after the satellite was complete, the team is still waiting for its launch provider, the Russian government, to deliver it to orbit. “The one piece of advice we got from everybody who came in here was ‘Oh, don’t worry about the launch vehicle,'” Berkenstock says with a wry look. After dallying with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the company decided to go with the far less expensive Russian plan, which would launch SkySat-1 on a decommissioned Soviet ICBM.

It was only after signing the agreement and paying part of the cost of the berth that Skybox discovered the catch: The actual launch date depends on both the Russian defense ministry and the office of president Vladimir Putin signing off. That paperwork has stalled in the Russian bureaucracy, and so the former Soviet ICBM has remained in its silo—and the Russians have no intention of giving Skybox its money back. But in May, the Russians finally approved the launch. The team is cautiously optimistic about a September date, with a second satellite heading up perhaps four months later.

For now, the would-be kings of space are forced to wait. One afternoon, Guinan takes me upstairs to see where the Skybox team will sit when the first satellite finally launches. “The NASA guys came around and said, ‘You need more than a closet for an operations room,'” he says, as he shows me around the half-finished setup, which looks like something between a Monday Night Football broadcast booth and the floor of a call center.

As he shows me where the launch will be broadcast and where the racks of servers will go, it’s obvious that his heart lies not in space but here on Earth, where he will stitch together the images as they flood in. In its own weird way, this vision of the future is just as inspiring as sending men to the moon. Yes, Skybox is planning to put the equivalent of cheap cell phone cameras into space, to beam the pictures down via something that is more or less DirecTV, to use cheap eyeballs to count cars or soybeans or whatever someone will pay to count. But the data those cameras provide might save the Amazon basin or the global coffee market—the uses are thrillingly infinite and unpredictable.

Yes, it takes astronauts to plant flags on the moon. But what the Skybox team has built is effectively a new kind of mirror, reflecting the entire planet in a continuous orbital data stream that will show us to ourselves in new and useful ways.
Provided, of course, that they can get it off the ground.

David Samuels (dsamuels1@gmail.com) is a contributing editor at Harper’s and author of The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart.